For A Fiction, Global Warming Is Already Massively Expensive

We already have an idea that, if certain people get their way, global warming will get extremely expensive in the future. But what have the claims about global warming cost us already? I don’t know that anyone has calculated all the money that has been spent in the U.S., but it has got to be pretty large. Of course, all the money spent is money that is transferred to others. Since the allegation of Global Warming was the reason the White House pushed solar energy so hard, Solyndra is an example of how some (who supported the President’s campaign) benefited from the flow of money.

Recently, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) named a figure on just the amount that has been spent in the military. According to CNS News,

“I’ve been working on this for quite some time … In the last five years, between 2009 and 2014, the president has spent $120 billion on the environmental agenda, mostly global warming, climate and that type of thing,” said Inhofe. “And in that respect, if you’ll just take the amount that was not authorized by Congress — and I’m talking about the environmental agenda, you could actually buy 1,400 F-35s.”

[…]

Breaking Defense reports that Lockheed Martin’s General Manager of the F-35 Lightning II program, Lorraine Martin, estimates the Air Force version of the F-35A will cost $75 million by 2019, which will be “less than any fourth generation fighter in the world.”

The Navy plans to order 33 fewer F-35s than originally planned over the five years beginning fiscal year 2015, because of budgetary pressures, and the Air Force is deferring orders for four F-35 models in FY2015, Reuters reported. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the total number of F-35s might be scaled back even further if automatic budget cuts set to resume in FY 2016 are not revoked.

Delusions have consequences.

I really don’t know how badly the Defense Department needs those planes (or how many they really need). But even if you don’t share Inhofe’s concerns, think about your own standard of living. Your government has been spending billions of dollars on a non-existent problem. It has robbed you to pay other people. More accurately, it has sold you and your children as collateral to pay other people.

Global Warming is only one of many delusions that government uses to justify spending money. Big government has to invent many such delusions so it can rationalize many robberies of that sort.

H. L. Mencken is proven right again:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.